24 Untapped Ways to Get Ideas for Your Next Blog Post

Blogging requires an inspiration to consistently publish high quality content that your target audience wants to read, share to their colleagues and helps your site earn links from relevant blogs/sites.

Generating better blog post ideas is a skill that can be learned easily and improved through research, reading content marketing blogs and investing on data-capturing activities like survey and polls.

In this post, I’d like to share 100 ways to find topics for your next blog post with step by step instructions and real life examples to help you apply every technique in the list.

But before that, here are a few things you should consider to maximize every blog topic generation technique in this post:

Don’t just focus on identifying the target keyword of the post/page; try to understand what topic is being discussed in order to create a comprehensive post about that topic.

Determine which content format attracts the most number of readers/visitors. Every industry has its own preferred content format (e.g. travel or parenting blogs prefer photo-based content with minimal texts in it).

Identify synonyms, entities and technical terms from successful blog posts or pages and include them to your content to improve your page’s relevancy and search ranking potential.

Let’s head over to actionable ways to find blog post ideas.

1. Other website’s successful pages

One of the easiest blog topic generators today is to get inspiration from other brands’ successful posts or pages. Because those pages had successfully brought traffic to a certain brand and got traction on other blogs (links and social engagement), you can rest assured that they have high potential to send organic, social and referral traffic to your blog as well (especially if the post provides unique information about that specific topic).

How to do it?

Step 1: Plugin in other website’s homepage URL (could be a competitor or an authoritative niche blog) to Open Site Explorer.

Step 2: Go to Top Pages.

Step 3: Visit all links in the first page of search results except company pages (about us, our team, etc…)

Given that pages in OSE are ranked from highest to lowest referring domains, you know that the topics covered by the top pages have high potentials to attract relevant backlinks in your industry.

This same marketing approach applies to online marketing. Online brands can take advantage of surveys to easily determine their audience’s wants and needs in order for them to create content assets that have highly valuable to the community.

One of the recently released micro-survey products is Qeryz. It is a tool that can help you gather data by asking questions to your visitors. The survey form can be visible in any page of your website.

Step 3: Sort the results by global/international searches and dates. You can also use the categories and web search options to get very specific results.

Step 4: Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at the queries section.

Think of how you can create the best content around those queries.

4. Get insights from Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMAs)

Reddit is one of the user-generated websites where you can find community-ranked content that is well-received by its members.

One of my favorite topic generation sections in Reddit is Reddit AMAs. The interviews for each industry expert can provide you tons of ideas and questions people want answers to, which are good topics to consider for your blog.

Step 2: Choose quotes that are related to your industry and categorize them under sub-topics (e.g. parenting for general family quotes).

Step 3: Publish it on your blog.

7. Case studies

Case studies give emphasis to your experience as a service provider or product creator simply by allowing people to know how you improved your services for your client, your content, your website or your business using a tool, service or strategy.

Why case studies work?

They show the expertise of the brand about certain topics people in the industry would definitely care about.

Stories make it more compelling for others to share the page or even link to it from their relevant blogs or sites.

When turned into a visual (e.g. infographics), the content is much more likely to be picked up by media outlets (journalists) and will create stories around it, especially if the data gathered is unique and interesting to their audience.

Here are a few examples of case studies that you can check out for references:

Step 2: You can click on one topic and bring it to the center of your mindmap.

Or use the plus button of the phrase/word to see more connected ideas.

Step 3: Discuss those ideas in your blog content or create a spreadsheet of terms/keywords that you might want to include to your posts to increase their relevancy factor.

9. Influencer’s top words in social

If you are new in blogging, one of the best ways to get inspirations for your blog is to stalk your influencers’ social profiles. By identifying their most used words/phrases in their tweets, you can determine what topics they’d like to share religiously on social platforms, particularly on Twitter.

How to do it?

Step 1: Go to Followerwonk and search for head term + blogger/journalist/researcher. Select a social influencer among the search results.

Step 2: Grab his or her Twitter profile to AllmyTweets. Click Hide Replies and Hide Retweets.

The post earned a lot of attention from the internet marketing community (encouraging more people to start their own blogs from scratch).

Things that make Matthew’s post work:

Emphasize learnings instead of just bragging about his strategies that worked effective for his blog (the first section What You Will Learn adds value to the readers).

The post ended by asking feedbacks or shares to his readers, which put more eyeballs to the content when people started to share it to their followers.

Provide more ways for new visitors to see his content by making the post sticky on the top side of the website.

The focus of the success post is on your blog, website or brand alone not on specific products or services you are offering, otherwise, they are considered as case studies already.

There is no step by step guide on how to do this because this is a case to case basis – if you succeed, then you can write about your success on your blog.

11. Twitter hashtags

Twitter is the best source of trending ideas in the community, whichever industry you are in.

Because people usually engage with other folks on Twitter, you can find a lot of questions, comments or updates that will inspire you to write your next blog post.

How to do it?

Step 1: Go to Twitter and search for #headterm (e.g. #parenting)

Step 2: Skim for interesting ideas, links, articles, questions or comments about that specific head term.

Step 3: Check out related hashtags and prospect for more status updates on Twitter.

12. Common mistakes in your niche

In any industry, there are mistakes to commit. For parenting, not spending too much time for kids is a huge mistake for them already. For SEOs, blocking your important pages in your site’s robots.txt file is a mistake to be considered by many folks.

Step 2: Visit each page in the search results and skim to what specifics you can discuss in your post. For my above example, parenting mistakes can be classified into two: parenting mistakes with kids and parenting mistakes with teens. In this case, you can either focus on one type or discuss both topics.

Step 3: Gather all the points (mistakes) you’ve found in your research (Google search).

You can also ask questions to niche bloggers in order to get more information for your blog post.

13. Amazon Book Search

Amazon is one the most popular book stores today, bringing millions of visitors to their website every month.

Digging into online book stores is one of the untapped content ideation techniques. Topics discussed in books and subcategories in book stores are inspirations that you can take advantage of for your blog content.

Step 2: List down ideas from news & notable section. You can also check out book titles that are unique and interesting to your audience.

Step 3: Populate your list by adding ideas from subtopics section of the Book (left side of the page).

14. Collect content contributions from top personalities

Collecting content contributions (insights) from influencers or experts in your industry is one of the best ways to generate a blog post these days, given that the collaborative content can create a detailed explanation of the topic chosen to be discussed by the blogger.

Tips from subject matter experts can bring out untapped knowledge to the community, which will make the content unique and outstanding to its audience.

Below are some good examples of crowdsourced content from two industries.

Choose a very specific topic and bloggers whom you think could provide valuable insights to your question (the more they’re interested to the subject; the probability of earning highly valued tips is higher).

After collecting tips from experts, invest in making the collaborative post attractive to readers (add some visual designs if necessary to entice visitors to share or link to it from their blogs).

If it is possible, provide incentives to contributors to encourage more participation from them in the future.

16. Advanced Twitter Search

Step 1: Do a Twitter search for your head term or keyword. Then click on Advanced Search in the left side of Twitter screen.

Step 2: Use available features in Twitter Advanced Search to look for specific tweets, questions or comments about a certain topic or keyword.

A few tips to maximize the use of Twitter Advanced Search:

Enable the location feature to find localized tweets or topics.

For international searches, it is better to choose the specific language you only want to see in the search results rather than the default option (any language).

Check the Question option to find only question tweets in your Twitter search.

17. Emphasizing benefits and features in products

Product reviews had been the common type of post for many affiliate marketers in almost every niche today. Aside from the monetary benefit it can provide for bloggers, product review is a great way to demonstrate their authority about a certain topic by adding benefits or value to their readers (showing how the product can make their readers’ lives better).

Here is a good example of a product review in the parenting category.

Things to make your product review earned the desired attention from community:

Use your own screenshots and not just grab existing screenshots of products being used.

Add disclaimer sentences to your post to make your audience aware that links pointing to product sites are affiliate links.

Don’t add many external affiliate links (at least two within the body of the content is enough to be noticed by your readers).

Categorize your product reviews and use subcategories in URLs like this example below.

18. Favorite blogs/bloggers

Curation removes mental blocks of writers because doing it only requires them to organize things under the same category in one big post.

Examples of curated content are:

Social influencers in the industry (e.g. Top 10 Parenting Bloggers You Should Start Following)

List of recommended products

List of companies sorted by highest to lowest revenues

Favorite blogs or bloggers you should start reading or following now

Now, let’s focus on the last example.

How to curate your favorite industry blogs or bloggers?

Step 1: Do a Google search for niche blogs (do it in case you still don’t have any list of popular blogs in your industry). But if you already have a list, just grab your notes and just start researching more info about your favorite bloggers.

Step 2: Think of how you will organize your list of blogs/bloggers. You can try any of the following:

Organize according to the highest to lowest traffic potential (use Alexa Rank).

Organize according to their engagement levels (use # of comments per post and social shares as your basis).

Organize according to their number of social followers (e.g. Twitter followers).

Step 3: Choose whether you want to make your curation weekly, yearly or in no-time (evergreen). For yearly curation, your only disadvantage is that you need to publish curated post year after year while for evergreen, you’ll just need to update the post (add new popular blogs or remove non-existing sites from the list).

19. Keyword Tool

Keywordtool.io is one of the effective keyword research tools that can provide instant long tail keywords as well as topical terms that you can target for your blog content.

How to do it?

Step 1: Search for your head term in Keywordtool.io.

For non-english blogs, you can choose your International Google search and language in the drop down menus.

You can copy all the terms in search results by clicking on the Copy All button, then paste those terms to your document (e.g. spreadsheet).

Step 2: Populate your list using secondary term keyword research.

Step 3: Identify two or more related terms talking about the same topic and target them all in your high quality content (don’t keyword stuff, just optimize for the topic you want to rank for).

20. Soovle

Soovle is another keyword research tool that you shouldn’t miss when doing content brainstorming, particularly for high-end researches.

Soovle can provide niche-specific terms from Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers.com, Google, Youtube and Bing, which makes the tool a one stop keyword research arsenal.

This will help you create a better high quality content through the context that you can write for your audience (e.g. the use of LSI terms).

How to use Soovle?

Step 1: Go to Soovle.com and search for your headterm. The website will automatically provide a list of relevant terms coming from different sources.

You can collect these terms straight from Soovle by downloading the list in .csv format.

Step 2: You can also use the Top Internet Keywords feature of Soovle to prospect for more keyword research terms.

21. Ultimate resource/guide

Strive for better marketing lies on improving the brand’s content marketing campaign. This includes producing only high quality content on the site that can resonate with the community being targeted by the brand as well as improving older pages that can potentially rank in search results and bring more new targeted visitors to the site.

This is a very simple process but will require huge time and effort to master this content approach.

I’m going to talk about the second step – make something even better.

One way to surpass the quality of someone else’s content is to understand what lacks within its context, its design and structure and most importantly, the information that a reader in your community should obtain from the post.

Here’s how to do it?

Step 1: Do a Google search for a target keyword (you can grab one term from your keyword list gathered from the methods I’ve shared with you earlier).

Step 2: Identify what’s lacking in the pages listed in search results. It could be the design, structure and information provided by the page. List all these important notes in one document so that it will remind you as you create your content.

Using the above example page, below are a few things that a parent blogger can add/remove:

Featured/customized image.

Experts’ insights/tips (tips from popular parent bloggers)

Actionable step by step guide for each tip in the list.

Remove distractions in the sidebar such as images and image links to make the content standout (you can customize the page format in your WordPress dashboard).

22. Faqfox

Questions are great sources of ideas for blog posts because they directly tell you the deepest needs of your audience.

Commonly, those questions are the exact phrases people use to search for references or resources in search engines.

And with the introduction of knowledge graph, the more direct, useful and authoritative your answer to a specific question, the possibility of earning the top spot of search results for the exact phrase or question is higher.

Step 2: Type in your head term/keyword. Select the category of your choice or if there are no categories to choose from, simply select Generic. Then click the Search button.

Step 3: Create a list of questions by simply downloading the spreadsheet from Faqfox.

23. Email newsletter

Email subscribers are the most engaging audience you would really want to connect to for content ideation. Because they are already familiar with your brand, you can easily ask for feedbacks and get their responses quickly via email.

If you already have existing subscribers, you can send them an email, asking for a topic that they’d like to discuss on your blog.

If you want to apply this blog ideation technique, you can replicate this email by Pat Flynn.

Why this email works?

The question is straightforward, Is there anything you want me to write a blog post about?. The email also includes that question in its subject line.

There is an indirect call to action at the end of the email (All you have to do is reply to this email)

You can do the same technique for your brand and make it easy for your team to create a content discussing a topic that your followers are looking forward to read on your blog.

24. PR Distribution Sites

PR Distribution sites can be sources of inspirations for brand asset creation (stories) and for blog posts that can potentially become viral in your community.

Step 2: Type in your niche term in the search box, then choose Press Release from the drop down menu list. Then click on the search button.

Step 3: Visit each news page in the search results. Skim the post and look for relevant terms/keywords used in the article. You can also look for content-led stories like new infographic produced by a certain brand and learn how they obtain real data and create content from there.

Venchito Tampon is the Co-Founder and Marketing Director of SharpRocket, a link development and content marketing agency that provides high quality link building and content development services to local and international clients. He is also a SEO and digital marketing and Filipino motivational speaker based in Manila, Philippines. Follow him on Google+ and Twitter.

I worth reading. It is very simple but effective theory just ” Search all platform which are related to your services or products and use it for promotion and also share knowledge or information on them, improve user engagement, do experiment. There are lots of options on internet interacting with users.

Hi Venchito,
Thanks for sharing us these ideas for writing posts and i always follow both ideas number 1 and 19 that is about taking the idea from a successful page and then get low competitive keywords for the article using keyword tool.

After building a pretty impressive email list by using a web form on my blog I realized that these people are gold for me.
They come to visit any new post added and they are also interested about everything related with the blog’s niche.

Thanks Venchito, this is a very detailed and long list to ponder. People like you help newbie bloggers decide on what they are going to post. As for me, I have found my way in blogging about ideas in business. Hope to see more of your post.